Judge Jim Gray - It's A Gray Area: Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It - Discusses The Issues: Judge James Gray Blog - www.judgejimgray.com

Monday, April 25, 2011

Are we watching? Do we care? - by Judge Jim Gray

In the April 18 edition of Newsweek, columnist Philip K. Howard published a "Dear Congress" letter setting forth several national policies that are broken, and demanding that they be addressed and fixed. This is similar to the open letter that was published in this space on April 3 that "gently but firmly" demanded strong leadership from Rep. John Campbell to address and resolve the problems with illegal immigration.

As a practical matter, with all of the political polarization and other problems facing our great country, mostly there is no one left but "We the People" to take action. Are we watching? Do we care? If so, we need to persuade our public leaders that getting and staying elected is not the same thing as governing.

In addition to illegal immigration, some of those areas that must be addressed are sunset provisions for all federal agencies, the reduction of the welfare system for both the poor and the wealthy, requiring new public employees to invest in 401(k) programs for their retirement, just like workers in the private sector, and the failed and hopeless policy of drug prohibition. All of these have an enormous negative impact upon our federal budget deficit, and there appears to be no good faith effort by Congress even to address, much less resolve them.

Two additional areas that simply must be addressed are the entitlements of Social Security and Medicare. Painful as it could be, we must understand that if Congress had indexed the retirement age of 65 to increases of life expectancy when it implemented these programs in 1935, people would not be eligible today for these entitlements until they reached their middle 70s. So since the national government simply cannot remain solvent by paying entitlements at this rate, we simply must increase the ages of eligibility.

But when addressing our budget deficits, there remains a huge issue that is almost never even mentioned that will go a long way in helping us regain fiscal solvency, and that is the federal ownership of land. Most people do not realize this, but today the federal government owns about 650 million acres of land, almost 30% of our country! This property is held as national parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, Indian reservations and military reservations, and for the good of the country's economic health, this landowning should be reassessed.

Of course, no one is proposing to sell Yellowstone, Yosemite or any of our other national treasures or military reservations that are necessary for our security. But the federal government also owns huge tracts of forests, deserts, meadows, mountains and shore lands. It would be better for everyone if that ownership were significantly reduced. (And if it is Native American land, give it back to them and let them run it!)

What would happen if some of this land were to be sold to the private sector? In addition to the monies received from the sales, the privately held land would also generate property, sales and income taxes, all of which would reduce the government's financial deficits.

But the benefits would be much more than financial. Not only is the federal government the largest polluter of land in the country, it virtually never manages property nearly as well as people do in the private sector. Why? Today the Bureau of Land Management, for example, leases out public grazing lands at artificially low rates to politically powerful people, who, in turn, have no incentive to keep from overgrazing it.

Put yourself in their place. If you had a lease to graze your cattle on government land for five years, you would want to maximize your short-term revenues as much as you could, without consideration of what it might do to the land. So you would tend to overgraze it. But if you were the owner, you would have incentives to husband the land, because if you didn't, it would decrease in utility and value.

As another example, in England many trout streams have been privatized, which means that, among other things, the owners can sue anyone who pollutes them upstream. As a result, the property is carefully husbanded, because a clean, beautiful and natural stream full of trout is more valuable for bringing in visitors and people who fish than one that is less so. Other examples are abundant, particularly in Africa with their wild animals.

That is not at all to say that the government should not have laws regarding things like pollution. The biggest example of that would be drilling for oil. It should mostly be allowed, but anyone drilling anywhere should first be required to post a significant bond with a financially strong and stable company that will be forced to pay for the cleanup and other ramifications of every drop of oil that is spilled. That way the bonding company will rigorously supervise all of the drilling, because its own money would be at stake.

So there is a better way. Are we watching? Do we care? If so, please join me in writing a letter to your member of Congress demanding that he or she take steps that will actually fix these problems. As we have said before, it is our government, and if it isn't working, it is nobody's fault but our own.

2 comments:

Many of the problems in our current government are caused by electing politicians that don't believe in government or don't believe that government can work efficiently.

Instead of trying to fix it, they have spent the last 30 years defunding it. They have taken the tax base away by signing treaties that sell our labor markets and have put many of us out of work. This lowers the cost of labor and that lowers the tax base more. Personal tax rates for the wealthy have fallen from around 90 percent during Eisenhower to about 36 percent today with unearned income only taxed at 15 percent. If the middle class tax base is gone, and the corporations get tax subsidies, how can one fund a functional government? You can't.

We gave 9 trillion dollars away to international banks in 2008 and 2009 caused by a bubble allowed by the repeal of Glass Steagall by Gramm, Leach, Bliley. This allowed banks to get into the gambling business. People that used to put their money back into their businesses in order to pay the high tax rate were now gambling with it and the banksters were more than willing to help.

Add in two unfunded, unending wars and you have all of the making of a third world country run by about 400 wealthy individuals and their managers. Removing or defunding the social safety nets, infrastructure and education systems of this country will spell the end of this great experiment in freedom. The international corporations will squash us if we dare to rise against them. The right to file a class action lawsuit was all but ended last week by the US Supreme Court. What chance does a person making 20 thousand dollars a year have hiring a lawyer to sue Nestle' for taking the water out of their well?

I don't think forcing people to work until 70 is going to make things better. They are just taking jobs away from younger, more productive people that need them. No I think the best way to fix this country is to regulate the banks again, end the wars, have a huge subsidized green energy push and rebuild our infrastructure. This would create jobs, jobs equal taxes, taxes fund the government. This is the time to grow or give up. Right now, we are giving up.

Judge Jim Gray

Follow by Email

Twitter

Judge Jim Gray

About Judge Jim Gray

Cited on numerous occasions for his work in the areas of both social reform and civic philanthropy, Judge James P. Gray currently presides over the civil trial calendar for the Superior Court of Orange County.
Judge Gray was appointed to the Santa Ana Municipal Court in 1983 by Governor George Deukmejian, and in 1989, Deukmejian elevated Gray to his post with the Superior Court.
Throughout his 29-year career within the legal and judicial community, Jim Gray has not only donated hundreds of hours of volunteer time to existing community service-oriented activities, he also has created and implemented a number of innovative programs of his own, each one a success story in itself.